CREATE Salon

2016-11-29

Dear CLARIAH-fellows,

The team of CREATE (UvA) has wonderful video reports, photo impressions, and blogposts on both last month’s THATCamp and the Creativity and the City Conference, so check them out at the Create-website.

Marcel Worring: VISTORY

Prof. dr. Marcel Worring (University of Amsterdam) on the project : Visual Analytics Approach for the Stylistic History of Painti

The objective of the VISTORY-project is to revive the study of stylistic development of painting with the help of computer learning. It will do so by developing a visual analytics framework in which we leverage the best of both worlds: Automatic analysis of large scale datasets by the computer, combined with the unique ability of art history experts to make detailed assessments of small sets of images. We will research how image features can be optimized by incorporating knowledge on the creation process and characteristics of materials. From there, we will consider how to visualize the results in such a way that art historians can interactively annotate and re-group the paintings. Machine learning methods will then be developed which use those interactions to improve the model of painting similarity the system has. Integrating the resulting data-driven similarities among the paintings with existing structured metadata about the paintings yield our stylistic histories in terms of visual characteristics, place, and time. The resulting suite of tools will be made available to the community as open source software.

VISTORY is funded by NWO and associated with the Netherlands Institute for Conservation, Art and Science (NICAS). Co-principal investigators in the Vistory project are prof.dr. Robert Erdmann (Rijksmuseum, UvA) and dr. Arjan De Koomen (UvA). Collaborating partners: Huygens ING, Radboud University, Rijksmuseum, and University of Amsterdam. See http://www.nicas-research.nl/research/current-projects/worring/vistory.html

Marcel Worring is full professor in data science for business analytics (Amsterdam Business School) and associate professor in the Informatics Institute (IvI), of which since September 1 he is also the director. Till September 1st, he was associate director of Amsterdam Data Science (www.amsterdamdatascience.nl). His research is in Multimedia Analytics, focussed on the integration of Multimedia Analysis, Multimedia Mining, Information Visualization, and Multimedia Interaction into a coherent framework which yields more than its constituent components. See also: https://staff.fnwi.uva.nl/m.worring.

Harm Nijboer: Wikidata

Dr. Harm Nijboer (University of Amsterdam/CREATE) on Wikidata and its potential for research in the humanities

Harm will briefly talk about the Wikidata project 'The Sum of all Paintings' and its relevance for doing 'big art history'. Wikidata contains structured data on nearly 160,000 paintings. In his talk he will discuss the quality of the (meta)data and demonstrate some strategies to effectively query these data. Wikidata is a free and open knowledge base that can be read and edited by both humans and machines. Wikidata acts as central storage for the structured data of its Wikimedia sister projects including Wikipedia, Wikivoyage, Wikisource, and others. Wikidata also provides support to many other sites and services beyond just Wikimedia projects! The content of Wikidata is available under a free license, exported using standard formats, and can be interlinked to other open data sets on the linked data web. https://www.wikidata.org

Harm Nijboer is historian and works as database specialist in the project Creative Amsterdam: An E-Humanities Perspective (CREATE), at the Amsterdam Centre of Cultural Heritage and Identity at the University of Amsterdam. From 2017 onwards, he will join the NWO project Golden Agents: Creative Industries and the Making of the Dutch Golden Age. http://www.nwo.nl/en/research-and-results/research-projects/i/17/26417.html